On fingertips of "washerwoman's hands" (author's transl)

An investigation method is proposed to find out quantitatively the beginning and the degree of "washerwoman's hands" at the fingertips. To answer the question, for how long there was contact with a fluid medium, systematic investigations are necessary to measure the width of the "cristae papillares" of several test persons with an onlight-photomicroscope under similar fluid conditions.     

Developmental tendencies in the situation of East Elbian rural labourers ∗

Abstract

Whereas orthodox economists supported the liberalization of goods and capital markets in the current global era, they typically assumed away the need to liberalize labour markets at an international level. The unexpected rise and then persistence of international immigration indicated the shortcomings of the orthodox account in theory and practice. Various recurring and contradictory or unsupported narratives were developed to ‘explain away’ the necessity or desirability of a policy of free migration, and this in spite of an ideology that otherwise promoted liberalization and choice in matters affecting goods and factor markets. There was, finally, a normative contradiction at the core of the orthodox account.     

European integration assessed in the light of the ‘rules vs. standards debate’

The interplay of various legal systems in the European Union (EU) has long triggered a debate on the tension between uniformity and diversity of Member States’ (MS) laws. This debate takes place among European legal scholars and is also paralleled by economic scholars, e.g. in the ambit of the ‘theory of federalism’. This paper takes an innovative perspective on the discrepancy between ‘centralized’ and ‘decentralized’ law-making in the EU by assessing it with the help of the rules versus standards debate. When should the EU legislator grant the national legislator leeway in the formulation of new laws and when should all be fixed ex ante at European level? The literature on the ‘optimal shape of legal norms’ shall be revisited in the light of law-making in the EU, centrally dealing with the question how much discretion shall be given to the national legislator; and under which circumstances. This paper enhances the established decisive factors for the choice of a rule or a standard in a national setting (complexity, volatility, judges’ specialization and frequency of application) by two new crucial factors (switching costs and the benefit of uniformity in terms of information costs) in order to assess law-making policies at EU level.     

Demography and democracy: the impact of youth cohort size on democratic stability in the world

The traditional explanations for the survival of democratic systems mostly include economic and cultural variables. Only rarely has attention been given to the age structure of a society. This article introduces a hypothesis involving the ‘youth bulge’ concept popular in conflict studies. It is hypothesized that democratic countries with proportionally large male youth cohorts are more likely to become dictatorships than societies with a smaller share of young men. A causal link between demography and democracy is assumed to exist because young men are the protagonists of virtually all violent political action as well as political extremism with a potential to threaten democracy. Strong evidence supporting the hypothesis is found using data for 110 countries in the period from 1972–2009.     

Assets and neighborhoods: The role of individual assets in neighborhood revitalization

Abstract

Asset‐building strategies—including individual development accounts, homeownership programs, and microenterprise development—became increasingly popular in the 1990s. Although research has demonstrated how assets produce individual benefits, less is known about the extent to which these benefits induce positive place‐based effects. We develop a model of the relationship between individual asset‐building strategies and neighborhood revitalization in order to inform future empirical work and help ensure that asset accumulation and neighborhood revitalization are mutually reinforcing. Our model emphasizes the conditions and programmatic factors that may encourage and discourage the transfer of benefits from individuals to neighborhoods.

Examples from case studies of four community‐based organizations suggest that the likelihood of neighborhood spillovers may be increased if policies and practices aim to “manage” the returns from the individual asset, retain asset holders, provide reinvestment conduits, track local purchasing power, and create additional opportunities for collective action.     

An Effective Approach to the Repeated Cross‐Sectional Design

Repeated cross‐sectional (RCS) designs are distinguishable from true panels and pooled cross‐sectional time series (PCSTS) since cross‐sectional units (e.g., individual survey respondents) appear but once in the data. This poses two serious challenges. First, as with PCSTS, autocorrelation threatens inferences. However, common solutions like differencing and using a lagged dependent variable are not possible with RCS since lags for i cannot be used. Second, although RCS designs contain information that allows both aggregate‐ and individual‐level analyses, available methods—from pooled ordinary least squares to PCSTS to time series—force researchers to choose one level of analysis. The PCSTS tool kit does not provide an appropriate solution, and we offer one here: double filtering with ARFIMA methods to account for autocorrelation in longer RCS followed by the use of multilevel modeling to estimate both aggregate‐ and individual‐level parameters simultaneously. We use Monte Carlo experiments and three applied examples to explore the advantages of our framework.     

The Detention of Asylum Seekers as a Crime of Obedience

This article deals with discretionary decisions made by British immigration officers about whether to detain asylum seekers. It takes as its point of departure the remarkable variety of views and practices reported by front line decision-makers interviewed at British ports (Weber and Gelsthorpe 2000; Weber and Landman 2002). The discussion begins by drawing historical parallels between the pre-Holocaust era and the present day hostility towards asylum seekers, which forms the wider context for official decision-making. It notes the failure of structural analyses to account for individual differences in rule-following and draws on theoretical perspectives developed by American social psychologists Kelman and Hamilton (1989) to explore the individual dynamics of conformity and dissent. In the concluding section, theoretical connections are made between the idea of discretionary detention as a crime of obedience, and contemporary discussion about state crime and governmentality. The underlying message of this article is as much a normative as an analytical one. While recognizing the practical limitations of individual conscience, the discussion ends, as it begins, by celebrating the emancipatory potential of dissent in the face of populist policies that sanction harm against targeted groups.     

An elementary proof of the conditions for a generalized Condorcet paradox

We give an elementary proof of the relationship between the possibility of a generalized majority rule cycle and the number of voters, V, the number of alternatives, A, and the number required for a majority, M.